Throwing Out S-CHIP

The President and Congress can’t seem to come to an agreement on what to do about S-CHIP. Congressional Democrats, and, unfortunately, a number of Republicans, want to lard the program with tens of billions more in taxpayer dollars. Bush just wants to adjust the program for inflation so that it keeps on going more or less as it is. In today’s New York Post, Cato’s Michael Cannon has a better solution: Dump the program entirely.

SCHIP is senseless. Like its much larger sibling, Medicaid, the program forces taxpayers to send their money to Washington so that Congress can send it back to state governments with strings attached. Both programs force taxpayers to subsidize people who don’t need help, discourage low-income families from climbing the economic ladder – and make private insurance more expensive for everyone else.

SCHIP casts a much wider net than suggested by its stated purpose – namely, providing coverage to children in families that earn too much to qualify for Medicaid (which ostensibly serves only the poor) but still can’t afford private insurance. According to a study in the journal Inquiry, 60 percent of children eligible for SCHIP already had private coverage when the program was created.

According to the federal Department of Health and Human Services, “About 45 percent of American children are currently enrolled in either Medicaid or SCHIP.”

That’s right. Almost half the kids in the U.S. are already covered–and yet, according to Nancy Pelosi and co., that’s still not enough.